The Angel VC

DECEMBER 27, 2016

As the year is coming to an end I’d like to share a few thoughts on what we’ll be looking for in the SaaS world in 2017. This is not meant to be an exhaustive enumeration but rather a brief outline of a few big themes that I feel particularly strongly about. 1) Viral growth and/or negative churn In the last couple of years I’ve come to the opinion that in order to build a SaaS unicorn you need to have either (a) a highly viral customer acquisition engine or (b) significant negative net churn (th

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SaaS Artificial Intelligence AI User Experience 183

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 8, 2016

When I say bubble, you likely conjure images of people speculating on real estate or stocks or tulips in your imagination. Like me, you might dismiss the folly of these bubbles as the collective action of a multitude of people who lose all rationality when bidding on these assets. But, as I learned from a recent interview with Brian Christian , bubbles can be created even when everyone acts rationally.

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Interviewing Startup Pricing Revenue 180

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

DECEMBER 3, 2016

No matter how hard you’ve been working on your marketing plan, it still might go wrong. That’s usually not for lack of effort. It’s just that software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing is hard. It’s different than marketing traditional on-premises software and it’s easy to make mistakes. I review the marketing programs of lots of SaaS companies and I see the same kind of mistakes over and over.

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Technical Review Marketing SaaS Travel 100

CloseSaaS

DECEMBER 5, 2016

So you’ve hit the 1,000 customer mark: Congratulations! You’ve made it further than many startups ever dream of going. But you and I both know you’re not done yet, so what’s next?

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Scale Startup Scaling B2B 72

Speaker: Timothy Chan, PhD., Head of Data Science

Are you ready to move beyond the basics and take a deep dive into the cutting-edge techniques that are reshaping the landscape of experimentation? 🌐 From Sequential Testing to Multi-Armed Bandits, Switchback Experiments to Stratified Sampling, Timothy Chan, Data Science Lead, is here to unravel the mysteries of these powerful methodologies that are revolutionizing how we approach testing.

Innovation

Brian Balfour

DECEMBER 19, 2016

(You can download my Yearly Growth Goals Template that I used on our team at HubSpot at the bottom of this post.) We are nearing the year end and that probably means many teams are finalizing their growth goals for next year. Just the thought of the planning process is probably jacking up your stress levels. After all, setting yearly growth goals in fast-changing environments feels like shooting darts blindfolded.

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Acquisition Strategy Retention Metrics 61

ReSci

DECEMBER 3, 2016

The game of Go has been making headlines in the last few months, but today marks an especially historic event: Google’s DeepMind computer program AlphaGo has won the final game…. The post AI Marketing: 3 Reasons Why eCommerce Marketers Need to Think Like Go Players appeared first on ReSci.

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AI Marketing 40

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 20, 2016

The end of the year is fast approaching. Time for some quantitative analysis of the content that readers liked the best this year. 2016 was a year of change for SaaS, and most of the story was the public market. Valuations there fell from their highs in 2014. More than $70B of public SaaS market cap was taken private by both other publics and also by private equity firms.

Software Review 100

Software Review Systems Review Startup Pricing 100

Hitenism

DECEMBER 26, 2016

2016 has been a year where knowledge has become freely available for anyone interested in knowing about all things SaaS. That’s because the people who are working in the SaaS industry or investing in these businesses are sharing much more of the details about all aspects of growing and scaling a SaaS business. Here are key trends from the top articles I’ve shared in my newsletter this year: SaaS is more crowded than ever, but you can still grow fast.

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Scale SaaS Marketplace as a Service SMB 152

CloseSaaS

DECEMBER 14, 2016

Unlimited Furniture, a luxury furniture and interior design company, had built a large audience on Instagram but was looking for ways to engage their followers in sales conversations.

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Sales Engagement 59

Advertisement

Explore how integrated payment strategies impact investor and buyer evaluations. Payments are more than a feature — they’re a key to long-term success and market differentiation. They help SaaS companies offer seamless user experiences and efficient operations. Investors and strategic buyers assess these integrated payment strategies as a measure of a company's growth potential and sustainability.

Payments

yoursales

DECEMBER 5, 2016

B2B SaaS LEADGEN VIA SOCIAL TOOLS B2B SaaS LEADGEN VIA SOCIAL TOOLS B2B SaaS LEADGEN VIA SOCIAL TOOLS T his time around we’ve got something special for you: A free step-by-step guide to B2B SaaS Leadgen via Social Tools. YourSales is a sales outsourcing company for B2B SaaS companies. With a global sales force and heaps of experience in B2B sales for SaaS companies, we help clients solve problems, help companies buy, and work with the sales funnel on a 24-hour basis.

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B2B SaaS Sales Outsourcing Mobile 40

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 15, 2016

SaaS startups often find themselves in one of three different states when contemplating their burn rate. The first is the David Farragut strategy. Damn the burn rate, full speed ahead. The second is the conservative approach - attaining profitability using only the cash on the balance sheet. Those two are easy. Circumstances dictate the respective aggression or conservatism.

Startup 100

Startup Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 11, 2016

Sales leaders consistently underinvest in sales team training and development. As SaaS startups scale, sales execution becomes the most tangible metric of a business’ success, and the one by which the business’ health is benchmarked. Not to mention how the head of sales is evaluated. When is the right time to invest in sales training? And how much should a business invest?

Scale 100

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Headcount 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 6, 2016

What is your SaaS startup worth in an acquisition? To answer that question, we can analyze the data set of all software companies acquired over the last six years and benchmark them by enterprise value-to-revenue multiples. What is your SaaS startup worth in an acquisition? To answer that question, we can analyze the data set of all software companies acquired over the last six years and benchmark them by enterprise value-to-revenue multiples.

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Acquisition Startup SaaS Benchmarks 100

Advertisement

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

Revenue

CloseSaaS

DECEMBER 21, 2016

This is a post by Brad Smith, a freelance marketing writer who gets sales. Kitchens are uncomfortable. They’re insufferably hot. Closed quarters. No windows or natural daylight.

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Sales Management Marketing 52

CloseSaaS

DECEMBER 26, 2016

"Thanks for the advice. Since implementing it, we have doubled our close rate." — James Kennedy, Founder, ProcurementExpress.com Every day, readers of our blog send us emails like these. They implemented our advice, saw results and share their wins with us.

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Sales 52

CloseSaaS

DECEMBER 7, 2016

Imagine yourself telling a difficult prospect, “You've enlisted my expertise and you've rejected it to go on the way you've been going. I'm not interested in that.” Before you can walk away, the once reluctant prospect is now anxious to do business with you.

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CloseSaaS

DECEMBER 12, 2016

The sales pipeline review. Probably the one meeting that makes your sales reps sweat the most. But its purpose is crucial: Keep deals moving through the funnel.

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Sales Management 52

As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.

Pricing

CloseSaaS

DECEMBER 24, 2016

What a year.

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Sales 52

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 17, 2016

Australia, Canada, Israel, China, India. SaaS startups are thriving in these countries and many more. Next generation software companies hail from many different parts of the world, and some of them are worth billions of dollars. Shopify and Hootsuite in Canada. Atlassian in Australia. Xero in New Zealand, just to name a few. As these successful startups have boomed, how has the early stage fundraising market for them evolved?

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Startup SaaS Software Review Finance 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 4, 2016

For hundreds of startups in the as-a-service world, the scores of product launches at last week’s Amazon Web Services Reinvent Conference each were a warning shot across their bows. We are coming. We are coming right after you, with tens of billions of dollars on our balance sheet, hundreds of salespeople, and the broadest suite of software and infrastructure since Oracle.

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Startup Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence AWS 100